Monday, July 15, 2013

US bankrolled anti-Morsi activists

Documents
reveal US money
trail to Egyptian groups that pressed for president's removal

Emad Mekay

Al Jazeera, 10 Jul 2013

[Condensed version of original article]

Berkeley,
United States -
President Barack Obama recently stated the United
States was not taking sides as Egypt's
crisis came to a head with the military overthrow of the democratically elected
president.

But a review of dozens of US federal government
documents shows Washington has
quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of
the country's now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi.

Documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting
Program at UC [University of California]
Berkeley show the US
channelled funding through a State Department programme to promote democracy in
the Middle East region. This programme vigorously
supported activists and politicians who have fomented unrest in Egypt,
after autocratic president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising in
February 2011.

Activists bankrolled by the programme include an
exiled Egyptian police officer who plotted the violent overthrow of the Morsi
government, an anti-Islamist politician who advocated closing mosques and
dragging preachers out by force, as well as a coterie of opposition politicians
who pushed for the ouster of the country's first democratically elected leader,
government documents show.

Information obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act, interviews, and public records reveal Washington's
"democracy assistance" may have violated Egyptian law, which
prohibits foreign political funding.

It may also have broken US government regulations that
ban the use of taxpayers' money to fund foreign politicians, or finance
subversive activities that target democratically elected governments.

'Bureau for
Democracy'

Washington's
democracy assistance programme for the Middle East is filtered
through a pyramid of agencies within the State Department. Hundreds of millions
of taxpayer dollars is channelled through the Bureau for Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor (DRL), The Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), USAID,
as well as the Washington-based, quasi-governmental organisation the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED).

In turn, those groups re-route money to other
organisations such as the International Republican Institute, the National
Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House, among others. Federal documents
show these groups have sent funds to certain organisations in Egypt,
mostly run by senior members of anti-Morsi political parties who double as NGO
activists.

A main conduit for channeling the State Department's
democracy funds to Egypt
has been the National Endowment for Democracy. Federal documents show NED,
which in 2011 was authorised an annual budget of $118m by Congress, funnelled
at least $120,000 over several years to an exiled Egyptian police officer who
has for years incited violence in his native country.

This appears to be in direct contradiction to its
Congressional mandate, which clearly states NED is to engage only in
"peaceful" political change overseas.

Exiled
policeman

Colonel Omar Afifi Soliman - who served in Egypt's
elite investigative police unit, notorious for human rights abuses - began
receiving NED funds in 2008 for at least four years.

During that time he and his followers targeted
Mubarak's government, and Soliman later followed the same tactics against the
military rulers who briefly replaced him. Most recently Soliman set his sights
on Morsi's government.

Soliman, who has refugee status in the US,
was sentenced in absentia last year for five years imprisonment by a Cairo
court for his role in inciting violence in 2011 against the embassies of Israel
and Saudi Arabia,
two US allies.

He also used social media to encourage violent attacks
against Egyptian officials, according to court documents and a review of his
social media posts.

US Internal Revenue Service documents reveal that NED
paid tens of thousands of dollars to Soliman through an organisation he created
called Hukuk Al-Nas (People's Rights), based in Falls Church, Virginia. Federal
forms show he is the only employee.

After he was awarded a 2008 human rights fellowship at
NED and moved to the US,
Soliman received a second $50,000 NED grant in 2009 for Hukuk Al-Nas. In 2010,
he received $60,000 and another $10,000 in 2011.

INED has removed public access to its Egyptian grant
recipients in 2011 and 2012 from its website. NED officials didn't respond to
repeated interview requests.

'Pro bono
advice'

NED's website says Soliman spreads only nonviolent
literature, and his group was set up to provide "immediate, pro bono
[free] legal advice through a telephone hotline, instant messaging, and other
social networking tools".

However, in Egyptian media interviews, social media
posts and YouTube videos, Soliman encouraged the violent overthrow of Egypt's
government, then led by the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.

"Incapacitate them by smashing their knee bones
first," he instructed followers on Facebook in late June, as Morsi's
opponents prepared massive street rallies against the government. Egypt's
US-funded and trained military later used those demonstrations to justify its
coup on July 3.

"Make a road bump with a broken palm tree to stop
the buses going into Cairo, and drench
the road around it with gas and diesel. When the bus slows down for the bump,
set it all ablaze so it will burn down with all the passengers inside … God
bless," Soliman's post read.

In late May he instructed, "Behead those who
control power, water and gas utilities."

More recent Facebook instructions to his 83,000
followers range from guidelines on spraying roads with a mix of auto oil and
gas - "20 litres of oil to 4 litres of gas"- to how to thwart cars
giving chase.

On a YouTube video, Soliman took credit for a failed
attempt in December to storm the Egyptian presidential palace with handguns and
Molotov cocktails to oust Morsi.

Funding
other Morsi opponents

Other beneficiaries of US
government funding are also opponents of the now-deposed president, some who
had called for Morsi's removal by force.

The Salvation Front main opposition bloc, of which
some members received US funding, has backed street protest campaigns that
turned violent against the elected government, in contradiction of many of the
State Department's own guidelines.

A long-time grantee of the National Endowment for
Democracy and other US
democracy groups is a 34-year old Egyptian woman, Esraa Abdel-Fatah, who sprang
to notoriety during the country's pitched battle over the new constitution in
December 2012.

She exhorted activists to lay siege to mosques and
drag from pulpits all Muslim preachers and religious figures who supported the
country's the proposed constitution, just before it went to a public
referendum.

The act of besieging mosques has continued ever since,
and several people have died in clashes defending them.

Federal records show Abdel-Fatah's NGO, the Egyptian
Democratic Academy, received support from NED, MEPI and NDI, among other State
Department-funded groups "assisting democracy". Records show NED gave
her organisation a one-year $75,000 grant in 2011.

Abdel-Fatah is politically active, crisscrossing Egypt
to rally support for her Al-Dostor Party, which is led by former UN nuclear
chief Mohamed El-Baradei, the most prominent figure in the Salvation Front. She
lent full support to the military takeover, and urged the West not call it a
"coup".

"June 30 will be the last day of Morsi's
term," she told the press a few weeks before the coup took place.

US
taxpayer money has also been sent to groups set up by some of Egypt's
richest people, raising questions about waste in the democracy programme.

Michael Meunier is a frequent guest on TV channels
that opposed Morsi. Head of the Al-Haya Party, Meunier - a dual US-Egyptian
citizen - has quietly collected US funding through his NGO, Hand In Hand for
Egypt Association.

Meunier's organisation was founded by some of the most
vehement opposition figures, including Egypt's richest man and well-known
Coptic Christian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, Tarek Heggy, an oil industry
executive, Salah Diab, Halliburton's partner in Egypt, and Usama Ghazali Harb,
a politician with roots in the Mubarak regime and a frequent US embassy
contact.

Meunier has denied receiving US
assistance, but government documents show USAID in 2011 granted his Cairo-based
organisation $873,355. Since 2009, it has taken in $1.3 million from the US
agency.

Meunier helped rally the country's five million
Christian Orthodox Coptic minority, who oppose Morsi's Islamist agenda, to take
to the streets against the president on June 30.

Reform and Development Party member Mohammed Essmat
al-Sadat received US
financial support through his Sadat Association for Social Development, a
grantee of The Middle East Partnership Initiative.

The federal grants records and database show in 2011
Sadat collected $84,445 from MEPI "to work with youth in the
post-revolutionary Egypt".

Sadat was a member of the coordination committee, the
main organising body for the June 30 anti-Morsi protest. Since 2008, he has
collected $265,176 in US funding. Sadat announced he will be running for office
again in upcoming parliamentary elections.

After soldiers and police killed more than 50 Morsi
supporters on Monday, Sadat defended the use of force and blamed the Muslim
Brotherhood, saying it used women and children as shields.

Some US-backed politicians have said Washington
tacitly encouraged them to incite protests.

"We were told by the Americans that if we see big
street protests that sustain themselves for a week, they will reconsider all
current US policies towards the Muslim Brotherhood regime," said Saaddin
Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American politician opposed Morsi.

Ibrahim's Ibn Khaldoun Center in Cairo
receives US
funding, one of the largest recipients of democracy promotion money in fact.

His comments followed statements by other Egyptian
opposition politicians claiming they had been prodded by US officials to whip
up public sentiment against Morsi before Washington
could publicly weigh in.

Democracy
programme defence

The practice of funding politicians and
anti-government activists through NGOs was vehemently defended by the State
Department and by a group of Washington-based Middle East
experts close to the programme.

"The line between politics and activism is very
blurred in this country," said David Linfield, spokesman for the US
Embassy in Cairo.

Others said the United
States cannot be held responsible for activities
by groups it doesn't control.

A Cairo court
convicted 43 local and foreign NGO workers last month on charges of illegally
using foreign funds to stir unrest in Egypt.
The US and UN
expressed concern over the move.

Some Egyptians, meanwhile, said the US
was out of line by sending cash through its democracy programme in the Middle
East to organisations run by political operators.

"Instead of being sincere about backing democracy
and reaching out to the Egyptian people, the US has chosen an unethical
path," said Esam Neizamy, an independent researcher into foreign funding
in Egypt, and a member of the country's Revolutionary Trustees, a group set up
to protect the 2011 revolution.